Joseph Belbruno Blog

  Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity Credit... Amir Levy/Getty Images Listen · 5:48 min 37 Opinion Columnist Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue,” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.” In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways. It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfun...